Thursday, January 31, 2013

I am still working my way through what to do about the Java problem security warning. US Homeland Security, no less, issued a warning that people should disable Java on their computers because of ongoing security problems.I can't tell you exactly what to do about the problem, but since I am not very techy and take a while to get through this stuff, I think I will pass on what I know so far so those of you who are more tech savvy than I am can get right on it.First, I am giving you a link to Homeland Security's computer security section. They are the ones who issued said alert about Java. Here is your link:http://www.us-cert.gov/current/

The above link to CERT also explains the problem with Java in more detail and tells how to deal with it. One of these suggestions is to update to the latest version of Java that is compatible with your system. Unfortunately, they also say that updating won't fix all of the Java problems. You can still get hacked anyway.The other solution from CERT seems to be to disable Java or the web browser part of it on your computer. Apparently this will also mean some things you may want to use on your computer won't work. As I understand it, Apple users are more vulnerable than other PCs to the Java problem. I'm trying not to laugh about that one. Apple users usually sail serenely past many malware and hacker problems that the rest of us are subject to. I am not enjoying their discomfiture, but some of them are inclined to gloat.Other PC users do not seem to be invulnerable to this Java problem, it just isn't quite as bad.Here is a nice quote from Tech News Daily about the problem: "Java is a favorite target of cybercriminals because it is so easy to exploit, and also because users are frequently using outdated versions of it."Here is a link to their site if you want to read their whole interesting article: http://www.technewsdaily.com/4165-disable-java-computer.html Here is a link to a site Tech News Daily offers that will check whether you need your Java updated and has the updates there:http://www.java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp

Tech News Daily offers more information about how to deal with your Java problem. I believe it may be a good idea to read it. They also have a sister site: Security News Daily that may tell you more about it. Here is a link to that site: http://www.technewsdaily.com/security/

My apologies for not giving you more definitive information about the Java problem, but not being very technically proficient, this is the best I can manage for you at this time. Since computer use is a vital part of emergency preparedness, for many people, including me, I felt it is important to share what I have anyway. Computer repairs or replacement can be very damaging to people, so we all need to do the best we can to protect our investment. I hope you, dear readers, will make it through yet another hazard safely.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Hot pot cooking is a very old way to save energy or fuel for cooking. It also allows you to do something else while your food cooks. The first time I read about it, I thought they meant, "Crock Pot", instead of "Hot Pot". A hot pot is probably a distant ancestor of the crock pot, but only requires heat to start the cooking process, so uses much less heat, energy or fuel to do the cooking.Some of the oldest ways to make a hot pot were probably done with straw or other dried plant materials used as insulation around the hot pot to hold in the heat. You can still use straw or other dried plant materials, if they are free or cheap and easy for you to get. There are now many more alternatives to straw to hold the heat around your hot pot and allow it to keep cooking without adding more heat. Old clothes, blankets, or other fabric can work for insulation around your hot pot. Natural fibers are safest to start out with until you understand what the heat will do to different kinds of fabric. Some synthetics are very flammable, so should not be used for a hot pot. Styrofoam, either the solid pieces, or peanuts for packing make excellent insulation around your hot pot. Shredded paper can also be insulation for your hot pot.Your hot pot will stay warmer if you have something to hold your insulating materials around it. A cardboard box will work, at least when you are starting out with your experiment.An ice chest would make a very good hot pot, as long as it belongs to you and isn't extremely expensive. When you start out, you will be finding out how hot your hot pot can be to start with and how you can safely hold that heat around your hot pot.If you have enough insulation around your hot pot, it can keep cooking for most of the day. Although the hot pot does not need to be tended to keep cooking for a long time, when you first start you should plan to be around and check it frequently. You don't want synthetic fabrics scorching and burning, and you may want to add more insulation.I read that it is believed that hot pots were first used so that people could work in the fields growing more food while their meal was cooking. Even if you don't work in the field, it can be nice to finish whatever kind of work you do and have a nice hot meal ready for you. Not only will practicing the use of a hot pot give you a pleasant meal that you don't have to fuss over, but it is teaching you skills that you can use in a disaster to cook with little fuel. It also helps you use less fuel now to save the environment and slow down climate change. You can cook dinner and be a hero at the same time.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Part of emergency preparedness is not letting your death become a headline somewhere. Probably not all of those people who died in that nightclub fire in Brazil had to die. If some of them had been prepared for such an emergency, they might have lived.Every so often there is a horrible fire in a crowded place and there it is in the headlines. You can do a few things to lessen your chances of being in one of those headlines.One of the things you need to know to be prepared for a fire in a crowded place is that when there is a fire you don't have very long to get out safely. Here is an article about the fire in Brazil and how to be prepared for that kind of emergency:http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/27/world/public-fire-safety/index.html?eref=igoogledmn_topstories

Here is an important quote from the article: "In most nightclub fires you only have a few minutes to find a way out," Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire sciences at John Jay College, said Sunday. "In Rhode Island, it was 90 seconds." He is talking about a fire in Rhode Island in 2003. People got out of that fire by finding other entrances besides the main one and breaking out windows to leave that way.Surprise, Corbett says there are two main things to get you through such an emergency - one is PREPAREDNESS. The other is reacting quickly.The National Fire Protection Association has a list of safety tips on its site. It starts

with how to decide whether to go in that place at all.It is a good idea to check to see whether you think the place looks safe from fire and you can get out if you need to. Are the exits clear and easy to exit? It is saferif the exits open outward. If there is a stampede, inward opening doors may become a death trap.

I like this site because they don't assume people know anything and cover the basics very well. Not all countries have a large staff of paid government fire inspectors checking everything that is built and opened for business. I would like for my readers to be safe everywhere.

Monday, January 28, 2013

You can make your fresh veggies last longer in your fridge. You, Dear Reader probably need to know how to do this. Recent studies show that 1/3 to 1/2 of all produce grown goes to waste. Not all of that is household waste, but a lot of it is. Wasting all of this food is costing you a lot of money. What could you do with up to half of your food bill money to use another way?Not only is all that wasted food costing you money, it is costing you the Earth. I already did a post explaining what a "carbon footprint" is. Well, if you waste a lot of food, then it makes your carbon footprint a lot bigger. That means you are making a big contribution to climate change. If you want to help save the Earth and your budget at the same time this blog post may help.I hope you will use muslin, cheesecloth or other lint free towels instead of paper towels to do this.When you get your groceries home from the store, you need to wash them off. Even if they are labelled "organic", that does not guarantee there are no pesticides on them. They have been sitting in the grocery before you got them and they don't want bugs crawling on their produce.This post is going to be mostly about lettuce.My first step is to run a sink of cold water. I add ice if necessary. I put one or two drops of dish soap in the water. Soap loosens up any oil based stuff, like pesticides, on your produce. I let the lettuce sit for a few minutes in the slightly soapy water and swish it once in a while. If you are very worried about pesticides, you need to swish it a lot and keep doing it.I decide how to put the lettuce in the sink by how wilted, or not, it looks. If it is very wilted, I may leave it in one piece, attached where the roots were cut off, before I do much to it. The cut root area can help it take up more water to start with. If the lettuce looks fairly fresh, I strip the leaves from the root stub and put them in the ice water that way. If I have put the whole thing in, I strip off the leaves once it looks a bit fresher and let it soak more.The ice water should rejuvenate the lettuce if it wilted any in the store or on the way home. If this process is new to you, it will amaze you to see how fresh looking the lettuce is.Once you are satisfied with how fresh and clean your lettuce is, then you need to drain the water off of it. I am not that fast at getting the lettuce ready for the fridge, so I leave most of it sitting in the water so it stays fresh, while I work on a little at a time.I use a collander to put a bit of lettuce aside to work on. I use the collander to let it drip and I shake the collander gently to encourage the lettuce to drip a little bit dry.If you use a salad spinner, now is the time to use it. If you don't use a salad spinner, you need to use towels to gently pat the leaves fairly dry.Once the leaves you are working on are a bit dry, you need a large plastic container to put them in. It needs to be lined with cloth (or paper towels) to keep the leaves dry in the fridge. Wetness is what makes your lettuce rot quickly.Put one layer of leaves on top of the cloth liner of your plastic container. If you want your lettuce ready to eat, you can tear up the leaves by hand at this point. Do not use a knife to cut up your leaves, that will make them rot fast. They have plastic knives for cutting up lettuce and the ceramic knives might work also. I don't use them, but do mine by hand. I think they make the leaves rot a little faster, even if not as fast as metal.Cover your first layer of leaves with a towel. Add another layer of leaves and cover that with a towel. Keep doing the same until your container is full. If too many leaves touch each other, especially towards the bottom of your container, they will rot faster.Once you fill your container with lettuce, you need one last layer of towel to prevent the lettuce from touching the container lid. It is now ready to put in the fridge. This container of lettuce will last a surprisingly long time. I have had them make it past two weeks. That is unusually long. It will usually last past a week, however. As I mentioned in my posts about how to save money on your shopping, the less time you spend in the store, the less money you will spend.Keeping your lettuce fresh at home and not needing to go to the store to buy more when it spoils before you finish eating it, will save you money. It will add up enough for you to notice after a while, as long as you don't squander your savings on something you don't really need. I hope you will use your savings to buy something for emergency preparedness.

Friday, January 25, 2013

The USA will draft women now. This is a very big historic change for our country. Once women can choose to go into combat, legally women have to go into combat the same as men do, if drafted. Women will have to register for selective service at age 18 now, also.

This is probably going to take some adjustment. It will probably make the USA more reluctant to go to war than we have been before now. I think this is a good thing. The USA has been too willing to start fighting and sending our men into battle. Most of our national debt was run up due to military costs. When it is our daughters lives on the line as well as our son's lives, we will think twice. Here is a picture of our budget:

US Budget 2013

This budget graph is from the Whitehouse site, according to Alex Jones. I checked the budget proposal on the Whitehouse site, and didn't find the above, but wasn't thorough.

Alex Jones tells us with his nifty 3 dimensional pie chart that the budget give over half of our government money to "defense", or 52%. That is bad enough.

The chart I found says that discretionary "security" spending is 686.0 billions for this year. It says that non-security discretionary spending is 656.8 billions for this year. I know they will defend that budget by saying that security involves things other than military spending.

If the USA was not hated by most of the rest of the world because of how we use our military, would we need all those security nazis and their expensive privacy invading equipment in our airports and now our ferries and trains and city sidewalks?

About 8 minutes or so the part that shows you what is happening starts. We are not getting this in our news. If you turn away your head and do not look, perhaps you will see it in your own home. We have the drones here already. Putting weapons on them is not difficult or expensive. It is not as expensive or as hard as box cutters on a plane flight.

Our own police have drones all over the USA now. "Innocent bystanders" get hurt all the time in gun battles. They can be hurt by drones as well as bullets.

There is always some fearsome reason why we have to have the latest, most lethal technology for our military and for our homeland security and then our police. Those innocent bystanders in the future of our own country will probably not be on the news either.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

This post is continued from yesterday.I was able to get a tiny bit more information about her from him in spite of his caution. I was already good enough at internet research to be able to use that bit of information to find the town she lived in and her mother's address. That was the easy part. The hard part was finding a way to get anyone to do anything to help the little cutter girl.I emailed the police in the town the girl lived in. They were not interested. They said since I was not in their jurisdiction when I told them about it, the case was not theirs. They said I needed to tell the police where I lived. I lived in California at the time. The girl lived clear across the country in another state.I called my local police department. They said since the girl was not in their jurisdiction, they could not do anything. I called the FBI. They said no crime had been committed at that point, so they could not do anything. They suggested I call the local police in the town where the girl lived.The only thing that came to mind was a local policeman that I had a slight acquaintance with. He had spoken at a meeting I attended and had liked one of my questions. This policeman had since been featured in a local news story.The story was somewhat related to the situation I was dealing with. The local policeman had caught an attempted international child molester, by using the internet.The intermational wannabe child molester was attempting to get a 13 or 14-year-old boy to steal his mother's credit card and use it to take a plane and fly from his country to California to meet him. The policeman tricked the international wannabe child molester into thinking he was a child to be preyed on and set a successful trap for him.I emailed the policeman and asked for his help. He did help. It took a while to get through all of this stuff before the local policeman came through. It was Christmas Day before the police in the girl's town entered her home and stopped her in the act of killing herself.That was way too close for comfort. I was really glad they stopped her, but still angry that it got that close and it took so much work to get anything done. I raised as much he-- as I could manage to get people to do something about the perverts lurking online for innocent children. Police departments opened up departments for online crime and the FBI did too. I am glad when I see they catch some of the illegitimate perverts before they do any more harm to children, who are our future. It is hard to think about the ones who still get away with it.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

I just skimmed an article that sends steam out my ears. It is about a sting by police of wannabe child molesters. The wannabes thought they were talking online with children they went to meet. I had an awful experience online with a child molester. I am going to go a bit afield from my normal posting area, sorta. I think protecting our children is important to the future of the human race. I regard it as preparedness.This particular wannabe child molester was in a chat room that I was in online. I suppose he thought I might be a child because I am weird. I didn't know some chat slang and asked about it. He zeroed in on me right away after that. He told me stuff so that I thought he was some kind of wonderful kind knight in shining armor. He was "counseling" a lot of young teens and preteen girls. He was chatting to a lot of them at the same time. He told me how many chats he had open at the same time. He often had 6 to 10 girls chatting with him at once, and me.After a fairly short time, his emails and chats seemed to be a little off from what he claimed to be. I began to encourage him to tell me more about the girls. He opened up about his intentions. I was aghast at what I was finding out from him about his plans for the girls. There was one in particular he wanted to meet. He told me she was a "cutter". I had not known what that meant until he mentioned it. A "cutter" is a person who cuts their own body out of some kind of sick compulsion. The wannabe child molester told me that she had told him that she intended to kill herself on Christmas Day. When he told me this, it was around Thanksgiving. That is about a month before Christmas Day in the USA, for non-US readers.I assumed that he was trying to prevent her from killing herself, since he told me that he was trying very hard to find out where she was.Boy was I wrong! He told me that he wanted to meet her and have sex with her before she killed herself. I let slip that this shocked me and I didn't like the idea. He clammed up and stopped letting me know more about her, for fear that I might ruin his plans.I am splitting this post here and will publish the other half tomorrow due to length.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

People usually protest a lot when gas prices rise. They are starting up again so the groaning has begun.I found a handy thing to take out some sting from the price rising.It has average gas prices by state, county, and city and even gets down to the gas stations in your neighborhood, or wherever you are travelling. They have an app on the site that you can use to find the cheapest prices at the pumps in your area. The site and app are called, "Gas Buddy".Here is a link to the site: http://www.gasbuddy.com/

Lest you decide that finding cheap gas prices allows you to drive around wasting gas, please remember that all the gas burned makes climate change worse.Here is a link to a nice gas price heat map. The red end of the map is the lower prices. I find it quite annoying that Californians, who burn gas like you wouldn't believe, have much cheaper gas than my state, which is much bigger and is a gas exporting state. I know this, because I am a recovering ex-Californian. :-)For my Canadian readers, here is a Canadian gas price heat map: http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_can_gastemperaturemap.aspxI should think that Canadians would turn a shade similar to their maple leaf on their flag when they live in the green end of the scale on that gas heat map. Having all those tar sands and exporting oil in a pipeline to the USA might do that when you get high prices too. I found a table that hasn't been published yet by the US Government about energy use and costs for different sectors of users up to and including 2040. These are assuming no big changes from how things are working now. Anyway. Maybe you can get more out of this table than I have so far. The only thing that strikes me about it is that price rises, if any, will be so low that far into the future. I don't see how that can be correct. Here is a link to the table and you can explore the rest of the site once you get there. If you don't like links, you can just look at it and type in what you need to get to the site: http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/tablebrowser/#release=AEO2013ER&subject=0-AEO2013ER&table=3-AEO2013ER&region=1-0&cases=full2012-d020112c,early2013-d102312a

Monday, January 21, 2013

I had a dream of the future. It was not good. I am going to share it with you here. I hope it will cause you to change some of what you are doing. This could give us a better future.There is a city in the desert that looks like stacks of sugar cubes. It almost hurts your eyes to look at it in the bright light. It is full of people who live in very small cubicles inside that city. The people in there do not do much except eat, watch electronic entertainment and sleep. Some of them come out of their cubicles and walk around a little. Many, perhaps most of them, do not ever come out. Some do not even eat on their own, but have tubes that feed them and remove their wastes. These do not even quite wake up until they die.The sugar cube city is a sort of mausoleum. It is a little bit alive, waiting until it is a completely dead mausoleum, with no mourners to come to it.There is a quiet place with deep soft carpets and velvet ropes hung from black metal. The ropes direct lines of people. They are waiting for their turn. There are long lines of the people waiting. There is a stone sarcophagus at the head of the line. The stone sarcophagus represents people who are alive now and who have been alive in the last generation. Those people represented are those responsible for climate change and the other problems that will come with it. They are people who know that what they have done and are still doing, to cause climate change could be stopped. They keep on doing the things that make climate change worse, even after they know about it.The person at the head of the line walks forward between velvet ropes near the stone sarcophagus and spits on the sarcophagus. Only one spit per person is allowed. There are many more people who want their turn.The people who are close to the head of the line do not talk. Their mouths are all full of spit.There is a channel in the floor to drain off the spit so that it will not overflow onto the carpets and people can still walk safely. There are guards standing close to the head of the line and at the corners of the sarcophagus. They are there to keep people from destroying the stone sarcophagus. It must be replaced once in a while in spite of the guards. It is not that hard to find another body to put in another stone sarcophagus. There are lots more bodies available. It just takes some time to do it. They have started keeping a few ready for replacements. They even have them in replacement stone sarcophagi. It makes people very angry not to get their turn. Everyone is afraid of what people will do if they do not get their turn.This dream is not frightening like a movie. It is more frightening in a way. Some of that is because it is about the people who are alive today and people who will come after us, and how they think about us.When I think about it, I often look for lights to turn off. I do not have a car, mostly because of thinking about this dream. I hope that you will remember this dream and turn off lights and drive your car less. Maybe you will even get a car that uses less gas. Those people in line may be your grandchildren.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Yesterday I mentioned that nuclear fusion may be the best solution to our world energy needs. The worst problem with it is that it will not be ready until about the year 2020. We are already in trouble with climate change from the fuel we have used for energy up to now. People are starting to quarrel over the fuel we have left. We do not have enough fuel to make energy for all of the people who want to use it now.We will need to look elsewhere for fuel sources to keep us going until we have fusion working for our power needs.One of the obvious places to look for energy is solar energy. We already know how to use solar energy. There are problems with solar energy, however. One of the problems with solar energy is that we don't have very efficient ways to use it yet. We have very big solar energy projects going in many places in the world. So far, none of them produce a very large percentage of the world's energy needs.Another problem with solar energy is that it takes a lot of materials and those materials are expensive. For an individual home-sized solar power project, the investment usually takes years to begin to pay for the investment to build it.Many people can not afford to invest in an expensive solar system and then wait a long time to get their money back from it. I believe that solar power used in simple ways can pay for the investment in it much faster than for whole electrical systems to run an entire home full of appliances. I have built my own solar ovens and cooked on them all summer. I lived in a temperate zone when I did that. In that temperate zone, cooking on my solar oven was not practical during the winter. Since that time I have discovered Fresnel lenses. They can greatly increase the heat in a solar oven. I live in a cold climate now and solar ovens using techniques besides Fresnel lenses is not practical for most of the year. Solar ovens with Fresnel lenses can give us a partial solution to energy needs for now. I believe the Fresnel lenses can help with other solar energy needs as well. I have experimented with them a little. I expect that I will tell you about that in later posts.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

I believe that the most promising source of energy in the quantities we all need is nuclear fusion.A lot of you readers probably are wondering what nuclear fusion is. I am not a rocket scientist, but I will tell you my version of it.Fission is the kind of nuclear power that we are using now. Here is a definition of it: fis·sion (fshn)n.1. The act or process of splitting into parts.2. A nuclear reaction in which an atomic nucleus, especially a heavy nucleus such as an isotope of uranium, splits into fragments, usually two fragments of comparable mass, releasing from 100 million to several hundred million electron volts of energy.3. Biology An asexual reproductive process in which a unicellular organism divides into two or more independently maturing daughter cells.v. fis·sioned, fis·sion·ing, fis·sionsv.tr.To cause (an atom) to undergo fission.v.intr.To undergo fission.This definition comes from this site:http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fission

Here is the definition of fusion: fu·sion (fyzhn)n.1. The act or procedure of liquefying or melting by the application of heat.2. The liquid or melted state induced by heat.3.a. The merging of different elements into a union: the fusion of copper and zinc to form brass; the difficult fusion of conflicting political factions.b. A union resulting from fusing: A fusion of religion and politics emerged.4. Physics A nuclear reaction in which nuclei combine to form more massive nuclei with the simultaneous release of energy.5. Music that blends jazz elements and the heavy repetitive rhythms of rock. Also called jazz-fusion, jazz-rock.6. A style of cooking that combines ingredients and techniques from very different cultures or countries.[Latin fsi, fsin-, from fsus, past participle of fundere, to melt; see gheu- in Indo-European roots.]This definition comes from the same site as the one for fission.In more common language, fission breaks apart atoms. We have to use special radioactive fuels to do this in the nuclear power plants that we have now. This kind of nuclear power can cause accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Daiichi Fukushima. Fission nuclear power also leaves dangerous wastes that can kill people for thousands of years. The dangerous wastes from the nuclear power plants we have now can kill us for longer than a human language has ever lasted. We don't even know how to tell people in the future that our nuclear waste can kill them, and how to take care of it so it won't kill them.Fusion is still a dream at this point. Scientists who are working on making Fusion power a reality, say it can be working about the year 2020. Fusion is the opposite of fission. Fusion joins atoms together instead of breaking them apart. It should not leave the dangerous wastes that fission does.One of the big problems stopping us from using fusion is how powerful it is. One way to understand how powerful it is, is to realize that the Sun is running on fusion. Fusion is so powerful that only a small amount of it will be enough to make a tremendous amount of energy. It is that tremendous amount of energy and power that is holding us back from using fusion. Scientists don't know yet what they can safely put it in. There is an international project located in France, called ITER. It's name means, "The Way", in Latin. Here is an article that tells more about it: http://www.newscientist.com/special/iter-benign-limitless-energy

According to the new scientist article, "Over half of the world's population is represented in the ITER Organization." Here are some of the countries involved with it: People's Republic of China, the European Union, the Republic of India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the United States of America.We are in trouble with energy now and 2020 is too far off to be much help to us right now. People are working on other energy solutions. I will post more about those tomorrow.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Everyone is in trouble unless we face up to some problems and get to work right away on them. One of these problems is climate change. A lot of us know that already. What we don't know is what to do about it.The problem of climate change is easier to face if we break it down into smaller problems that make up the bigger problem of climate change. One of these smaller problems that make up the bigger problem of climate change is energy.We have a finite amount of traditional energy sources or fuels, left in the world. These fuels are things like, oil, gas, nuclear fuel, coal, wood, etc. This would be a problem anyway if the number of people who want to get energy from our existing energy fuels will stay the same. The problem is made much worse because the number of people who want energy keeps growing, and the people who are already alive want to use more and more fuel.An example of people wanting to use more and more fuel is the Chinese. As their standard of living has risen, they have more money to spend and want to have more things that use energy. This is true for people in other countries as well.A side effect of more people wanting more of existing fuel, is conflict. When a lot of people want the same thing, they often want to fight to get it. This can mean more wars. Since humans have much more destructive and dangerous weapons than ever before, war is even more dangerous than it has been. The risk to our lives and the future of the human race from this quarreling over fuel is worse than climate change.There are two main ways to solve this problem of competition for fuel and the wars that can come from it. One way is for everyone to use less fuel. The other way is for us to get more fuel.We are not having good results so far with the first option. Everyone wants other people to use less fuel and leave more for themselves. The rich countries want the poor people to conserve fuel. The poor countries want the rich countries to conserve fuel. The other option seems to be the one we are stuck with. I wish to write some posts about possible ways for us to get more fuel. I plan to begin posting about ways for us to get more fuel tomorrow.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Experts say that we can expect cyber attacks this year. Are you ready for this? Losing our computers would be bad enough, but it can be much more serious than that.People are beginning to be more aware of the existence of EMPs as a side effect of nuclear explosions and solar flare activity. Many countries are making weapons that have the primary purpose of producing EMPs to attack another country's electronics. If you have been paying attention, various nations and others have already used computers for attacks across borders. One of these has shut down the United States' White House web site. That is not as exciting as if it had been the Pentagon, but it is still the head of our government. We have had hackers succeed in getting into the Pentagon, however. Governments tend to grab hackers who are in their country and give them a choice of working for the gov or going to prison. lol. We are getting a lot of hackers working for our government.It is probably the same elsewhere. War is going to be different. Terminator here we come.http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-space-activities-raising-u-satellite-security-concerns-061300435.html

I already posted several times on how to make your own Faraday Cage. It is not too much more difficult than gift wrapping. I hope you will put a reserve cell phone and emergency radio in a Faraday Cage. I didn't phrase that right. You should put a cell phone in a Faraday Cage and make another Faraday Cage and then put the radio in that.I gather it is not good to have a small Faraday Cage with two or more electronic objects in it. It is probably also better to use something like a metal garbage can with insulation inside and the smaller Faraday Cages inside the insulation. Then bury the garbage can at least 3 feet deep.This is kind of a pain, but sudden withdrawal from all electronics, including news sources might be worse. You will also have to charge batteries at appropriate intervals. I told you this in earlier posts, but newbies won't know and maybe you didn't look or forgot.

Monday, January 14, 2013

As we face a new year many of us think about our past and what we have done with our life so far.One of the special things about Human Beings is that we are capable of thinking. We are able to use that ability to think about ourselves and what we are doing in life and our goals and plans for the future.People who belong to many very different religions all believe, along with independent thinking individuals, that each person has a purpose in life. I happen to believe this way. I think that each of my readers and everyone else has a dominant reason for their existence on earth in this lifetime.I believe that we may or may not fulfill our reason for existence. I think it is very sad when someone goes through their entire life completely unaware of their purpose for living. I do not believe real happiness is possible unless a person tries to find out their purpose in life, and makes an attempt to fulfill that purpose.Depending on what your specific purpose in life is, it is possible that you will not be able to achieve the act or acts that make up your reason for existence. Circumstances beyond your own control may make it impossible. Even if this is the case for you, unless you at least find your purpose and try to fulfill it, your life is not complete and neither are you.

Making no effort to find your purpose in life does not affect only you. There is a hole left incomplete that can cause ripples that keep spreading forever and farther than you can imagine.One of my ways of thinking of how this hole that one person might leave, by not fulfilling their purpose in life is like knitting. One person might be like one stitch in knitting. If you drop one stitch, it leaves a hole and makes all the stitches under it unravel. The unravelling can go clear back to the beginning of the work, and leave a hole in every row after it.No matter how unimportant you may feel, you are important. Take that thought forward with you into this new year and into the rest of your life. You are important.You have a reason for being. It is your job to find out what your reason for being is. Then, whatever that reason for your existence is, you can try your best to fulfill your purpose in this life.You are important.

Friday, January 11, 2013

In the face of uncertainty about what will happen to you due to climate change, the rest of our lives looks pretty overwhelming.Don't be discouraged. The number of people who are willing to make the changes in their lives in order to deal effectively with climate change is underwhelming. That does not mean that because you are concerned, and want to do something about this, that you are alone. There are others besides us.Keep looking. We are starting to find each other. Meanwhile, don't let yourself be paralyzed into inaction. There are concrete things you can do on your own.Number one is LEARN. Keep up at least in general about what is going on with climate change and how it has, is, and will, affect us.Two is LEARN how to adapt to the changing conditions on the earth as climate change progresses. High up on this agenda should be producing food for yourself and others. Agriculture should be a high priority. It is not possible to learn overnight, how to raise your own food. It can take years to get good at it. Don't let the length of time it takes to develop a "green thumb" discourage you either. You will never learn unless you begin. Whatever time you put in now will come out of what you will need to know to survive some day. I want to put that thought into easy to understand words so I don't leave anyone out.It takes a while for you to be able to eat your first crop. You have to plant it and tend it for a while before tiny shoots come up and get big enough to eat. It will take even longer to get a meal out of those seeds if you do not know what you are doing. If you plant before the last frost, your seeds and the little plants that come from them may even die and force you to start over and plant more seeds. If you don't plant them right as far as spacing and sunlight, etc., they will not grow as fast and not as many of them will grow.If your knowledge of gardening is good enough, it may lower the time it takes from getting your seeds to turn into food you can eat. Practice growing food from seeds will get you fed sooner than if you are ignorant as you put your seeds in the ground.

If we have a very widespread emergency, that takes a lot of resources to deal with the people in the disaster area will have a greater need to feed themselves. If you not only have seeds and you are in that disaster area, but you also know how to plant and grow those seeds to food, you have a better chance to eat well.I hope you will not leave your preparedness at buying a can of heirloom seeds and leave them on the back of your preparedness shelf, but will plant some heirloom seeds and get good at gardening now.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

You are the only person in the world that can make you happy the rest of your life. No matter what happens to you, you can choose to be happy. This is on beyond the glass that is half full or half empty idea.

Your happiness is not dependent on anything outside of yourself. You can decide to be happy, no matter what is going on. I am not talking about a state of pink cloud bliss every moment. This is the idea that the way you generally feel about yourself is that you are happy.

A friend of mine was pretty hard core about this idea of happiness regardless of your circumstances. He told me that he had a miserable cold one time. He annoyed me by telling me that he was happy regardless of his cold and that he was actually enjoying having a cold.

I expressed my doubt about him enjoying having a cold. He told me more about it. He said that he was enjoying all of the interesting things that a cold caused to happen to his body. He liked the way his nose was dripping and he said he particularly liked it when he sneezed.

The nose dripping gave me a lot of trouble about enjoying it. I could understand the sneeze enjoyment more easily.There is a pleasant sense of relief when you sneeze.

I still can't emulate my friend with his enjoyment of colds. You don't have to be happy about the same things that someone else is happy about. I may not enjoy a cold, but I do like the nice warm feeling of being snuggled into blankets and waking up feeling better. Those are things I can choose to be happy about. You can pick your own.

No matter what happens to you, it is possible to find something to feel happy about. You can concentrate on the happy parts and ignore the rest.

If you read the Celestine Prophecies, you already know that you can look at something you like and get energy from appreciating it and drawing that pleasure up into yourself. You can do the same with anything you enjoy.

You can store that energy/happiness and run on it in the times where it is more scarce for you. The more you do this, the better you will become at doing it.

Keep looking for things that give you energy/happiness. The more you look for them, the more you will find. The more it you find the more you can store away inside you. All of this will result in you being happy more often.

I have not reached the exalted state where I am happy all of the time, but I suspect it is quite possible. I am happy most of the time. I think it is possible to manage to become happy all of the time. That is what I am going for - being happy all of the time. I think you can do this also, dear reader. I hope you will start working on that. I would like for you to be happy all of the time.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

If your Go Bag is not yet complete, please decide what you need to do to make it ready for you to use in case of an evacuation in your area.This blog has quite a number of posts on the subject of Go Bags. I have several on how to choose a Go Bag. I have mentioned that my preference is a backpack because it will not throw your off balance by carrying it and your hands will be free. You can move faster and climb and scramble more easily and safely. This can be important if the evacuation in your area turns into gridlock and the streets become impassible to vehicles. It is fairly likely you will need to climb over cars in really badly gridlocked intersections.Wandering dogs can be common during a disaster. They will often be frightened and confused and more likely to be a threat to you and your loved ones as you attempt to evacuate past said dogs.Be sure to include the best radio that you can afford in your Go Bag. A friend got a very small cheap wind up radio and was disappointed. The cheap radio does not get a good signal even when conditions for the signal are almost ideal. It is just not good to think about what might have happened if you were stuck with a cheap radio in the middle of disaster.I also have lots of posts on this blog about picking out an emergency radio. One of the posts mentions a new kind of alert system that will let you know sooner that trouble is heading your way.As I mentioned yesterday, I am in the middle of major re- or organizing my home and especially my emergency preparedness supplies. That means I am not going to write a very long post for a few days. I wish you a Happy New Year! again, and hope you work on your emergency preparedness. That way I know you will be safer if an emergency arises near you.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

There is something about New Years that makes people want to change their lives for the better and get organized. I am no exception to this. My home is all torn up in an attempt to get better organized. One of my favorite methods of trying to get better organized is to put like items or items for the same activity into a container together. I also like to label it all so I don't have to look through a lot of containers to find something.I especially like Olde English Text Labels. Yeah. Yeah. I know they can slow you down reading them a little. But they look so incredibly beautiful on little labels on things. I just can't resist them. I especially like them in the kitchen.They seem to be a standard font in Microsoft Office. Here is a fairly painless way to organize your spices:You need a bigger container that the spice bottles will fit into. I use old plastic ice cream buckets. They have a nice little handle to carry them with. 1) Pick out spices that you use for the same kind of cooking. I put all of my main dish spices together, all of the side dish spices, and dessert spices together in the same bucket. 2) Make labels for each bucket. I like to use a large font in bold for the side of the spice buckets. 3) Get some clear tape, wide tape is easier. Cut off the tape so the piece is longer than the label. I like enough over lap so the tape will stick easily to the bucket beyond the edges of the label.4) Stick the tape over the label so that the label is covered. Leave some tape exposed around the edges of the label.5) Stick the label with the tape over it onto the bucket. 6) Admire your new wipe off somewhat waterproof label on your spice bucket.I also like to put herbal teas together in a bucket. You can also make a bucket tea kit with whatever you need to make yourself tea, in it.It is also helpful to put a list of what is on each shelf on the cabinet door across from the shelf. You can mark off things as you use them. This makes it much easier to restock as needed, so you don't get caught short on something important during an emergency. It is easy to make a shopping list by looking at your cabinet doors.If you want to get even more organized, you can input your supplies into a spreadsheet and use that to generate shopping lists and keep track of how fast you use different items.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Photos were recently posted of thousands of shark fins drying on roof tops in Hong Kong. The fins are often hacked off live sharks which are then thrown back into the ocean. This practice will soon result in extinction of many kinds of sharks.

Humans have already caused climate change with our careless behavior. This shark killing is another careless behavior that will end up harming humans.

All the systems on earth are balanced. When we take out too many parts of these systems, the whole system can crash.

Some "people" really are too stupid to live.The human race is not advanced enough to live on other planets. We only have the Earth for now. It does not make good sense to destroy the one planet we need to live on.Climate change is speeding up even more than pessimistic scientists expected. The only way for the human race to survive, is for all of us to stop what we are doing and work together as hard as we can to stop climate change and begin a repair process. This will not be easy. The hurricanes/cyclones, tornadoes, forest fires etc. which are the consequences of climate change will kill a lot of people before we can stop the progression of climate change and begin to make it better.We can't escape the consequences of climate change. Neither the moon, other planets, or shelters on the Earth will protect us from the consequences of climate change. We all have to face it. We are running out of time to do this. Waiting much longer will be fatal for everyone.It is time for us to face the problem of climate change. We don't have time to keep hiding this necessity from ourselves. We must start now.

Friday, January 4, 2013

A Climate Refugee is anyone who has to leave home because of problems due to Climate Change. You remember all those people forced out of their homes by Hurricane Katrina in football stadiums along with hundreds of other people. They aren't the only Climate Refugees. Entire islands have sunk beneath the rising ocean waters. Everyone on these islands had to leave their homes to survive. I posted about one of these islands and its people - Tuvalu and the Tuvaluans. The mostly emigrated to New Zealand. The New Zealanders welcomed them to the largest, safe nearby body of land. Over 180 villages in my state, Alaska, are going under the ocean as it rises. Two of them were already scheduled to be evacuated. There are still people left on both islands, Shishmaref and Kivalina. Breakwaters were built for both island in an attempt to delay the evacuations. The breakwater worked for Shishmaref, but not for Kivalina. Some people have already left both islands. Some of them had no choice because their homes were already destroyed by the rising ocean waters.Another big cause of climate refugees is drought or loss of water for survival needs and agriculture. This is happening all over the world. Drought also causes forest fires that are worse than ever before. Many climate refugees are forced out of their homes because of fires.We all know about Tsunamis and the refugees who had to leave because the Tsunami in Japan caused the nuclear power plant failures. We can expect more of these, some in the United States. Not all of the US nuclear power plants that are at risk of failure due to climate change because of Tsunamis. There is at least one that is vulnerable to higher record-setting floods than have already happened. Since we can expect weather records to continue to be set for the rest of the lives of everyone on earth now, and beyond, we can expect to get floods that will destabilize nuclear power plants.The people who run these nuclear power plants are not admitting the vulnerability of their power plants. I can only guess this is due to money. In case these nuclear power plant operators are not risking another worse than Fukushima Daichi disaster out of greed, my next guess is even worse. They may want lots of people to die.There is a huge granite memorial in Georgia, in the USA called, "The Georgia Guidestones". It was commissioned by an unknown wealthy man who paid for it and disappeared. It does not spell it out that some people want lots of other people to die, but it says that the world population should be maintained at 500,000,000. Since we are way over that population figure, that means they want the rest of us gone.Some people intend to avert the increase in climate change that will cause the extinction of the human race. They will do this by killing off enough of the human race to leave their close friends and slaves and themselves with plenty.This is not a complete list of the causes of people who are and will be, forced to leave home because of climate change. I am just trying to get my Dear Readers to become aware that this will be a growing problem that must be attended to without our normal human delay.Even if you are not personally forced from your home because of climate change in your lifetime, you will be affected by it.